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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26438230">Damnatio Memoriae</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/sayhitoforever/pseuds/sayhitoforever'>sayhitoforever</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Bleach</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ancient Egypt, I want actual feral gremlin energy BFFs Nel and Grimm to be my only brand now, Identity Porn, Lots of Historical References, M/M, technically, that are accurate thank you very much</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 04:48:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,036</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26438230</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/sayhitoforever/pseuds/sayhitoforever</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Egyptian archaeologist Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez makes a horrifying discovery while on a trip with his partner and becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Grimmjow Jaegerjaques/Kurosaki Ichigo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>81</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>GrimmIchi Mythology</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Damnatio Memoriae</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For the GrimmIchi Discord's September Mythology event! This is part of the Week 2 prompts for Egypt!<br/>In typical fashion for me, I bit off more than I could chew and got carried away. So this is the first part of this story, so that I can say I actually posted some of it on time.<br/>Comments are always deeply appreciated. Thank you for reading! 🖤</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <hr/><p><em><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
Damnatio Memoriae</em> – Latin, meaning “condemnation of memory”, indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. There are and have been many routes to <em>damnatio</em>, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
He wakes in the quiet twilight of the cooling desert as a delicate breeze scatters sand across his pants. There’s hard stone at his back and he blinks blearily as he looks out, down the singular road that leads out to the darkening horizon with nothing of the sun left but a thin strip of orange. His legs are stretched out long before him and there’s the definite pain of a nerve beginning to pinch in his lower back. He rolls his shoulders back a little with a grimace, the soft, satisfying pop of vertebrae sounding. His mouth feels like it’s full of cottonballs and when he swallows, it’s dry, scratchy, and disgustingly sandy. He glances down to his notebook still open and cradled in his lap, one hand holding the fluttering pages down, and it’s safe to assume his pen is long gone. Something is tickling at one of his pant legs and he stares groggily down at it.</p><p>“Son of a bitch!” He’s on his feet and nearly tripping over them, one hand grabbing ahold of the limestone wall he’d just been leaning against and vaulting over it.</p><p>“Parkour on a fifteenth century cultural monument is probably illegal, you know,” comes the voice of his partner from a few steps up, but he doesn’t so much as glance at her.</p><p>“Shut up, Nelliel,” he hisses, peering out across the dark sand for any sign of the insect. He flinches a little when it lights up, a round of brightness from Nel’s flashlight as she points it directly at the yellow blob scuttling across the pale sand.</p><p>“<em>Leiurus quinquestriatus,</em>” she comments, following it up with a low whistle. “Some spirit in this Necropolis is certainly watching over you tonight, Dr. Jaegerjaquez.”</p><p>A Deathstalker, mere centimeters from making its way up his pant leg. “Fuckin’ hate scorpions,” Grimmjow mutters under his breath and does the awkward little jig that any respectable Egyptologist would just to be sure there’s nothing else on him.</p><p>“Rule number eight: Don’t—”</p><p>“Fall asleep in the desert, <em>I know,</em>” he snaps, cutting Nel off. She shines her flashlight directly in Grimmjow’s eyes, and he throws his free hand up with a whispered curse.</p><p>“Could have sworn you were hungover for that entire workshop. My bad.” She clicks the flashlight on and off in his face a couple times before he turns away from her with a scowl.</p><p>He brushes himself down, shirt collar to boots, before reaching up to adjust his backwards baseball cap. <em>White, American trash </em>is what his mentor had always told him he looked like when he started wearing it on digs. But it was bold talk coming from a man who was never seen without his egregiously green and white striped bucket hat and paper fan. At least Grimmjow’s neck was protected from the sun and he didn’t look like an absolute fuckin’ moron in front of his colleagues, and the dead, and maybe even the gods themselves.</p><p>“What are you doing out here? I thought you were sketching the first sanctuary doorway.”</p><p>“I was,” Grimmjow admits through gritted teeth as he turns back to look at Nel.</p><p>She’s still a few steps above him, an exasperated expression twisting up her beautiful, but exhausted face. Her seafoam-green hair is tied in a tight ponytail on top of her head and there’s a sheen of sweat on her forehead barely visible in the fast fading daylight. Her white linen shirt has turned a decided shade of tan from the dirt and sand and her olive-green cargo pants have a rip above her left knee that wasn’t there when she’d wandered off. This was only their second day of the week-long invitational pass they’d managed to talk the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities out of while the temple was closed to the public for a continuing restoration project of the temple’s Upper Terrace. Five days was <em>nothing</em> and they’d both easily been clocking seventeen-hour days, not wanting to waste a minute more than they could afford.</p><p>“And?” she presses, reaching back to slide her flashlight into the outer pocket of her backpack.</p><p>“And it was beginning to piss me off because there’s whole chips in it with things missing.” He holds out his notebook to her with his last page open. It’s a pen-only sketch of a square foot of the left side of the doorway, carefully recreated down to said missing chips in the meticulously painted, ancient reliefs.</p><p>Grimmjow runs a hand through his hair that’s practically plastered to his head under his cap, sweat and sand and the remnants of hair gel. Nel presses the tips of her fingers to the blank spaces where hieroglyphs should be and frowns. Of the two of them, her reading comprehension of hieroglyphs is much better than his, she just couldn’t draw a straight line to save her life. It made them an excellent translation team.</p><p>“Can we go look? This… '<em>May he live eternally'…</em>” Her frown deepens further, brow creasing as she leafs back through the other pages that he’d done over the course of the day. “Did it look like normal erosion?”</p><p>He shrugs as he fits his baseball cap backwards on his head once more and shoves his hand into one of his pockets for another pen. Withdrawing a fistful of sand first that he dumps on the ground with an exasperated sigh, he dives in again and finds a pencil nearly sharpened down to a stub. Good enough. “It’s close to the floor of the doorway, so it’s possible that heavy sandstorms over time could have kicked up enough stone and chipped away at spots slowly.”</p><p>“Is this all you sketched today?” Nel asks, flipping between the page he’d handed her and the one before it.</p><p>Grimmjow gives her a withering look. “<em>That</em> is four square feet of mapping, bitch. You’re lucky I’m not looking at you cross-eyed right now.”</p><p>She ignores him with practiced ease and turns to look at the very same doorway. The temple is not lit up from within as it so typically is when it’s open to tourists. Instead, the lights that dot the grounds shine onto the awe-inspiring sprawl carved into the base of the cliff. It’s haunting to behold without the usual internal illumination of warm yellow, the lights that make it seem inhabited by something other than the dead. The daunting ramp up to the first colonnaded terrace, rows upon rows of carved columns is majestic all on its own, even without the usual grandeur of full brightness. But even the site lights are not enough to look at the doorway again and Nel’s flashlight was only going to do so much good. Grimmjow had already sketched what he could of the lower portions of the doorway, the next section would require a lot of squinting, and the section above that a camera with a decent lens.</p><p>“Tomorrow,” Grimmjow sighs. It absolutely hadn’t been dark when he’d sat down, which meant he was at his limit for the day. Any work they did now he wouldn’t retain. “I’ll bring my camera with me too.”</p><p>He half expects her to protest, insist that they can stay for at least a few more hours despite the set sun and stars reigning overhead. Instead she takes in the dark circles under his eyes that practically mirror her own, a combination of jet lag and maybe five hours of sleep for the last two nights, and heaves out a defeated sigh. She closes his notebook and holds it out for him to take warily.</p><p>“Don’t look at me like that; you’re right.” Nel reaches behind her to slip her other backpack strap over her shoulder, jostling until it rests the way she wants it to. “Besides, it’s still a half mile hike back to the parking lot.”</p><p>Grimmjow narrows his eyes, closes the distance between them to stare nearly nose-to-nose with her. “Are you a pod person? Were you body snatched in the ante chamber?</p><p>Nel puts both hands flat on his chest and gives him a firm shove and Grimmjow lets out a sharp laugh as his boots barely skid on the limestone beneath them. “You are so <em>weird!</em> I’m leaving, you better get your shit fast and hope you make it to the parking lot before I leave.”</p><p>It’s a reasonable threat considering she’s done it before, leaving Grimmjow damn near sprinting after the car, the only thing saving him being the security gate she had to stop at to leave the site. He scrambles to scoop up his own gear and follows after her. Clearly, he’s the more exhausted of the two of them though because Nel talks at a mile a minute on the trek back, rambling on about the <em>opacity of the red ochre pigment</em>, and even the distant wail of car horns and traffic isn’t enough to drown her out the whole way back to the hotel. Grimmjow is more than fuckin’ happy to rest his forehead on the glass of the passenger window, angle the AC vent directly at his face, and tune her out. He watches the light of the city of Luxor twinkle across the stretch of the Nile as Nel pulls onto the main drag and can only groan when she shakes him awake in the hotel lot a half hour later.</p><p>“Dibs on first shower,” Nel calls as Grimmjow kicks their hotel room door open. He sneers at the back of her head as it disappears into the bathroom and drops his gear on the floor. He shucks down to his boxers, empties what seems like literal pounds of sand in his boots into the trash bin, and sits on the edge of his bed with the day’s notebook.</p><p>Nel’s chattering starts up immediately when she gets out of the bathroom and Grimmjow is relieved to slam the door in her face and stand in relative quiet under the spray of the shower for twenty minutes until the drain runs clear without sand or dirt. The drum of the water on his shoulder relieves a little of the tension in his muscles from having his arms at the same angle all fucking day, sketching. She has the nightly news running, in Arabic of course, when he emerges feeling a little bit closer to human. She doesn’t miss a beat, muting the TV to talk, even as Grimmjow faceplants directly into his own bed, hair still wet, skin pink from the heat of his shower. He gives her all of five minutes before he can’t listen to pigment opacity anymore.</p><p>“Just shut up and go to sleep, Nelliel. <em>Please,</em>” Grimmjow groans, burying his face down into his pillow.</p><p>From between the padding of down feathers, he hears Nel’s defeated sigh and doesn’t have to lift his head to know the lights are off when he hears the click of the switch. He pays no mind to the flickering light from the muted TV, knows that even her exhaustion will win out over her stubbornness. The steady whir of the hotel room air conditioner serves as good white noise and it doesn’t take long for the exhaustion that’s aching in every line of Grimmjow’s body to pull him under.</p><p>Grimmjow sleeps restlessly, tossing and turning, lower back sore from napping upright against stone, unable to get comfortable. He doesn’t sink into the heavy blackness of deep sleep until the first fingers of sunlight begin to creep through the shitty hotel curtains. And then it’s like cement shoes, holding him down and under in a wavering dream.</p><p>“<em>I want to thank you</em>,” murmurs a voice just beside him, male, a smooth timber pitched low, intimate almost.</p><p>Grimmjow looks over his shoulder and sees nothing but a stretch of sand dotted with the crumbling remains of limestone blocks. The horizon ripples with heat waves but he sees no one, so he turns to look the other way only to find the towering edge of a temple wall. The façade of it is covered in the painstakingly careful lines of hieroglyphs, but there are sections that seem to tremble like a heatwave of their own, empty and glaring.</p><p>“For what?” Grimmjow asks. The collar of his shirt is damp with sweat, nothing new there, but he doesn’t have his baseball cap. Stupid, he thinks, must have forgotten it in the hotel room. And on a day as hot as this one feels already, no less.</p><p>“<em>No one has ever looked twice at that which has been removed</em>,” comes the voice once more, nearly in his ear. A shiver scuttles it’s way up Grimmjow’s spine, the faintest tickle of lucidity, and he frowns.</p><p>“What has been removed?” When he turns around this time, Grimmjow swears something black and hazy wavers in his peripherals, moving just a bit faster than him. But it’s just sand and stone and a cloudless, blue sky and no one for miles. There’s a sense of déjà vu prickling in the back of his mind as he glances around, taking in his surroundings that are achingly familiar, yet somehow, he can’t place it.</p><p>“<em>They have taken my name</em>.”</p><p>There is a fierce kind of grief in that declaration. Anguish and fury in equal measure in that quiet voice. Grimmjow does a full circle, whipping around when something brushes his forearm, feather-light and too much like the caress of fingers. But there’s no one.</p><p>“Who took it? Who are you?” Grimmjow demands as he lurches forward, needing to move, to follow the voice. The rest of the world around him is a void, bereft of sound or other movement as he moves, tunnel-vision focus.</p><p>“<em>You must finish your work so that I may finally rest.</em>”</p><p>Grimmjow squints, face scrunched up as he throws a hand up to his brow to shade his eyes from the sun. It looks so much like the courtyard of the Precinct of Mut that another shiver of lucidity skitters across Grimmjow’s skin. Only everything is practically in technicolor, all the reliefs painted lovingly on the walls in brilliant, unfaded colors, nothing like the way they look now. Down the row of immense carved pillars and paved stone, to the inky maw of a great stone doorway, something vaguely like the outline of a man shimmers there like a heat mirage. He starts at a jog, body spurred to movement as the outline seems to shift, put weight on his other leg almost. It’s then that he regrets never joining Nel for any of her beach runs because sprinting in sand is nigh impossible.</p><p>“<em>What little faith I have left lies with you, Grimmjow</em>.”</p><p>He wakes with a shuddering gasp, whole body jolting into consciousness as his eyes fly open. It takes a few panicked, scrambling seconds to realize where he is. Hotel, in Luxor, in Egypt, with Nelliel, on a trip. Not in an achingly familiar temple somewhere in the desert with a stranger with a voice like silk talking in his ear. He can hear the shower running quietly behind the closed bathroom door and he rolls over onto his back to stare wide-eyed at the ceiling. The hand Grimmjow unearths from the tangle of blankets is shaking as he drags it down his face.</p><p>That had felt so visceral, too real for any comfort. But it had been just a silhouette, practically the shadow of a person, no face and no identifying features. A bodiless voice, kind and genuine and grief stricken, stranded in a place that Grimmjow was simultaneously very familiar with but wasn’t sure he’d really <em>been</em> to before. The only time he’d ever seen the Precinct of Mut in a condition that pristine had been in a digital reconstruction that one of the kids in his master’s program had submitted as part of their thesis. It had been a rendering of what the temple would have looked like after completion, in the fifteenth century <em>BC.</em></p><p>Grimmjow kicks at the mess he made of the sheets, unwinding his legs to swing them over the side of the bed. There was no use dwelling on it. It was just wasting time he didn’t have. Instead, he moves about the room, getting his gear together. He yanks clothes out of his duffel, checks his email briefly on his laptop, and reaches for his backpack. In goes an entirely new pack of pens, two flashlights, his notebook from yesterday, as many bottles of water as he can fit into it. His hand strays on the stack of older notebooks from previous trips and digs atop the tiny, hotel desk he’d brought along. Ones from the Luxor Temple, the Speos Artemidos, and the temple at Karnak.</p><p>It’s a split-second decision, a whim, to shove one of his Karnak Temple notebooks into his backpack before settling his camera and long lens cases in it. He sets it by the door next to his boots before rounding on Nel.</p><p>“Hurry up, I need to piss!” he shouts as he raps his knuckles on the bathroom door. A heartbeat later and Nel is throwing the sliding door open, a wall of shower steam rolling out and parting to reveal her grumpy expression. She’s fully dressed, hair still hanging damp down her back.</p><p>“You have the patience of whatever the opposite of a saint is,” she grumbles, shouldering him aside.</p><p>“I want a banana, three pieces of toast, and—”</p><p>“And coffee with more cream and sugar than any human should consume. Yeah, I know the drill,” she sighs in exasperation. He grins as he yanks the door shut on her grabbing a keycard off the dresser and heading out.</p><p>They’re on the same road back to the temple a half hour later, Grimmjow having wolfed down his toast and taking the rest into the car with him. He’s harping on the pointlessness of Nel showering before spending all day sweating in the blistering heat, rolling around in the sand, when she slams on the brakes, making him nearly deepthroat his banana. He glares murder at her and they’re both silent for the rest of the drive. Stupid shit like that was nowhere near enough to open even the tiniest of rifts between them though.</p><p>Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez and Nelliel Tu Odelschwanck had been through their undergraduate, their masters, and their doctoral programs together, worked on more projects together than separately that all Google results for either of them immediately brought up the other. They got confused for siblings or a couple everywhere they went when the truth of the matter was so much simpler. They were platonic soulmates. They could frighten even the most seasoned archaeologists by finishing each other’s thoughts and fought to ensure that they both got equal recognition for their hard work. Being a woman in their field was tough work and Grimmjow wouldn’t accept contracts or projects anymore unless Nel was extended equal work and rights. Similarly, she worked tirelessly to make sure that Grimmjow was only seen as reputable. Blue hair, a resting bitch face, and a foul mouth made him seem like the most unacademic academic around.</p><p>They were a team, inseparable. They knew everything about each other, kept no secrets, shared everything in life worth sharing, it’s joys and it’s woes. So, Grimmjow contemplating whether or not he should tell Nel about his whack ass dream is a first in several ways. Because it’s pointless, he thinks. Just a dream, like any other dream he’s had in his twenty-eight years. Only it isn’t, because Grimmjow has never had a semi-lucid dream that he vividly remembers every detail of like this one.</p><p>Nel parks and tucks their parking pass into the windshield as Grimmjow chugs the rest of his coffee. They gather all their gear from the trunk and begin the half mile walk to the temple proper. It’s weird to see the parking lot so empty without cars or tourists, but Grimmjow can’t help but appreciate the quietude of the morning.</p><p>“I want to check out that doorway you were sketching yesterday,” Nel speaks up and Grimmjow nods, having figured as much.</p><p>“I packed the long lens,” he replies as she stoops over briefly to snatch up a chunk of rock. He barely pays her any mind considering how par the course her behavior is, as she turns it over in her hands, inspecting it closely.</p><p>At least, he barely pays attention until she lifts it to her face and gives the hunk of stone a kitten lick. “Definitely limestone,” she muses aloud, sounding thoughtful and pleased with herself.</p><p>“Don’t lick shit you can’t identify!” he exclaims, unable to stop his face from twisting up in disgust and sticking his tongue out at the imagined taste and sensation. He can’t believe she just made him witness that with his own two eyes.</p><p>“I just identified it though.” Nel chucks the stone back into the sand, and Grimmjow can’t help but look over her shoulder and stare at the thing like it’s personally offended him.</p><p>“What’re you, three?! Don’t pick shit up and stick it in your mouth.”</p><p>“I wanted to be sure!” she counters, reaching out to slug him in the shoulder. “I have a developing theory that all limestone has a specific taste.”</p><p>“I didn’t come all this way with you so that you could get your rocks off on <em>literal rocks.</em>”</p><p>Her hazel eyes roll so hard that he’s surprised they don’t see the back of her skull as they come up to the long ramp of the temple. There’s the distant sound of voices and work coming from the Upper Terrace where the restoration project is already underway, taking advantage of the morning’s slightly cooler temperatures like they were. The two of them hoof it up the ramp to the first sanctuary doorway that Grimmjow had been working on and fall into a routine as comfortable as anything.</p><p>Grimmjow shrugs his backpack off, hands Nel the camera and the long lens to attach, and withdraws his notebook from yesterday and a fresh pen. He leaves his pack on the ground as Nel fits the lens to the camera, looping the strap around her neck, and he leafs to a fresh page. She’s staring up past where Grimmjow intends to sketch today, near the ceiling of the doorway, camera cradled in her palms. He steps forward, licks the tip of his pen, a terrible habit, and gets the date and number of his section’s grid written down before he looks back at Nel who suspiciously hasn’t moved yet.</p><p>“Let’s play chicken,” she grins, wide and evil, and how anyone can think that Grimmjow is the absolute bastard out of the two of them is beyond him.</p><p>“Fuck no,” he replies on instinct, holding his hand level with his own forehead, far above where Nel could even jump up and hope to hit. “You must be this tall to ride this attraction.”</p><p>It’s undignified what happens next, certainly not behavior befitting decorated scholars such as themselves. But Nel always gets what she wants somehow. She’s got Grimmjow down on his knees, notebook and pen abandoned on the cobbled limestone floor of the temple’s terrace, as she seats herself on his shoulders, snatching his hat from his head and putting it on her own before wiggling her bony ass until her crotch is pressed to the back of his skull.</p><p>“Jesus fuck, I need to up my deadlift weight,” he huffs out as he stands slowly, wobbling a little under the added weight.</p><p>“This pussy to face action is wasted on you,” Nel bemoans as she tries to remain motionless, let Grimmjow find his center of balance, holding the camera up so it doesn’t crack him in the head.</p><p>“Not even blind drunk...” he begins to say as he gets his hands under the cuffs of her pants, pushing her weirdly high-ankled socks down, and grips her bare skin.</p><p>“Cairo, 2016.”</p><p>“<em>You</em> were drunk,” he seethes as he takes a tester step forward to see if he can support her weight. “Focus, hoe.”</p><p>Grimmjow can barely see her raise the camera to eye level, spinning the lens and peering through the viewfinder to utilize the zoom. She does her best to move very little, just her head and her arms to hold the camera up. It’s a quiet enough that morning that Grimmjow can hear her soft gasp when she spots something.</p><p>“Up here, there’s more that’s chipped away,” she calls down to him and Grimmjow grits his teeth, rocking a little precariously as he tries to hold her steady. His hands are sweaty where they grip her bare ankles, so he grips them even tighter. “It has the same title preceding it as your sketches of the lower doorway from yesterday. '<em>May he live eternally'…</em>”</p><p>“You didn’t have shit written like that unless you were important. An advisor, a scribe, a royal nurse, <em>someone,</em>” Grimmjow manages to grind out as the two of them sway like a palm tree in a gale.</p><p>“Hold me steady, I’m going to take a picture.” Grimmjow resists the urge to roll his eyes, as if that hadn’t been what he’d been trying to do this whole time. He hears the shutter click several times and holds his breath. “Okay, you can let me down.”</p><p>More indignity as Grimmjow sinks down to his knees again, lowering his head like he was bowing to the open blackness of the sanctuary doorway to allow Nel to slide off his shoulders. He reaches back and of course his hair is all mussed to shit now. Nel’s eyes are glued to the screen of the camera as he stands, rolling out his shoulders and cracking his neck. He grabs his hat off her head with a grumbled curse and dons it once more before crowding her to try and see what she’s staring so intently at.</p><p>“Do you have your notebooks from Karnak Temple on you?” she asks suddenly without looking up and Grimmjow blinks.</p><p>“Just the one in my backpack right now. A few back in the hotel, but the rest are scanned on my laptop. Why?”</p><p>Nel holds the camera out to Grimmjow, the strap still around her neck, and makes sure the brightness of the screen is dialed up to a hundred. She zooms in to a space that seems to have worn away and gestures at the edges visible in the photo. “What does that remind you of?”</p><p>“The rest of these god damn blanks I’ve been staring at the last few days.” And it is precisely that, a spot no larger than his thumb where the hieroglyphics have worn away. The pigment is faded and chipped with the many centuries, a remnant of the bright colors they used to be. He takes the camera from her hands but not her neck to look from a proper angle, tapping the zoom button a few more times until the image begins to pixelate on the small screen.</p><p>“I’m serious, Grimmjow. Look at the edges. Does that not remind you of something?” Nel mimes a hammer and chisel, tap-tap-tapping away, and a frigid sort of realization rages in Grimmjow’s chest like a blizzard. “Where’s the <em>name</em>, Grimmjow? <em>Who</em> is supposed to be resting eternally here?”</p><p>“Karnak,” Grimmjow thinks aloud, brain turning over the new information at lightspeed. “Both of these temples had sections built by the same pharaoh. The purification scenes… on the walls going into the Precinct of Mut. Shit had been… <em>missing.</em>” He looks up at her and she looks about as manic as he feels, a wild gleam in her hazel eyes that says they’re having the same thought as always. “We thought it was damage from that obelisk that cracked in half and fell on it back in ‘99.”</p><p>Grimmjow looks up, up, up at the towering structure of the sanctuary doorway, can barely see the missing bits he knows are there, the ones he’s been glancing up at all week, one of the ones Nel has just photographed. Both of them take a couple steps back simultaneously, their movements nearly tandem as they crane their necks and stare in abject horror. Grimmjow continues to stare and wonders if he should tell Nel about his strange dream that was beginning to make everything even stranger now. Nel, for all of her education, and her view of life firmly rooted in reality, was hugely superstitious. She wouldn’t even come with Grimmjow years ago when he visited King Tut’s tomb, refused to even touch the vial of sand he’d brought back as a souvenir for himself, to join his growing shelf of specimens in his home office.</p><p>But what they’re looking at isn’t superstition or facts they’ve twisted to suit a theory. It can’t be. It’s blatant, as loud as an ambulance siren, as his eyes dart from one spot to another, a growing, sharp sense of distress building in his chest. He counts ten in total, spots that don’t look natural now that he’s <em>really</em> looking at them, even from all the way down here.</p><p>“They— <em>they brought in scaffolding,</em>” Nel laments, the mourning stark in her usually chipper voice. “They erased every mention that they could have.”</p><p>“Damnatio Memoriae,” Grimmjow whispers, unable to tear his eyes away, and the look Nel swings him in his peripherals is bewildered and visibly upset. “What the Romans tried to do to Nero, what the Roman Catholic church tried to do to John Wycliffe. Destroy all mention in name and make the use of their name a condemnable offense so that they could be forgotten entirely.”</p><p>“They tried to erase someone,” she breathes as they lock eyes and Grimmjow knows he has to tell her now. Ten plus years of higher education has drilled into him one indisputable truth: there’s no such thing as coincidence.</p><p>
  <em>They have taken my name.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading! Comments are <i>greatly</i> appreciated and fuel my writing dumpster fire of a brain!</p><p>You can find me on Twitter acting a fool on the regular <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/sayhitoforeverr">here</a><br/>Join the GrimmIchi Discord <a href="https://discord.gg/kk8MvvqG4U">here!</a></p></blockquote></div></div>
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